The only time I ever see reference to 'mind/brain debates' around CFS it's from people trying to pretend that this is why patients are angry at their mistreatment, not from patients attempting to engage in an argument here. It's not a sterile debate but a sadly still virile excuse.

The last study on this found that CFS patients and MS patients had similar attitudes... lets see if this new study can provide more useful cover for the quacks.

Also, from above, these are the potential advantages of combining neurology and psychiatry:

•Prevent blame and stigma attached to mental illness
•Improve morale, training and retention in psychiatry
•More joined up care
•Prevent the shrinkage of psychiatry
•Bring us into line with other organs.

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So many problems are caused by psychiatrists wanting to improve the morale of psychiatrists. Why is it assumed that their morale is lower than it should be?

I find it ironic that White, Wessely and the others from that group are promoting the idea that CFS is a mental illness in the sense that it originates in flawed thinking and beliefs. This is exactly the source of stigma, and exactly the opposite of ending the 18th century distinction between mental and physical illness.

Maybe psychiatry would have a better reputation with less hypocrisy, dogma and misanthropic beliefs towards patients.

So many problems are caused by psychiatrists wanting to improve the morale of psychiatrists. Why is it assumed that their morale is lower than it should be?

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'We are doing you good, I tell you, good. And all you damn serfs do is wilfully refuse to recover. It is really bringing us down, dudes. Can you at least pretend to be a bit better, so we can go on kidding ourselves, getting appointed to influential advisory committees, and collecting knighthoods and fat pay checks.

I find it ironic that White, Wessely and the others from that group are promoting the idea that CFS is a mental illness in the sense that it originates in flawed thinking and beliefs. This is exactly the source of stigma, and exactly the opposite of ending the 18th century distinction between mental and physical illness. Maybe psychiatry would have a better reputation with less hypocrisy, dogma and misanthropic beliefs towards patients.

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Repeatedly bungling the interpretation of data from clinical trials isn't helping their reputation much either. I read that Bono from U2 had a bike accident and he underestimated the difficulty in recovery and said he may never play the guitar again. <sarcasm>But we all know from CFS psychobabble that what Bono really needs is a redefining of recovery so that he can already be classified as recovered despite major impairment as long as he has a superficially-inflated sense of confidence and adjustment from CBT. Objective outcomes like actually playing the guitar again are just unreasonable expectations either derived from cognitive distortions about past capabilities or were just part of his premorbid lifestyle which contributed to his accident in the first place. At his age he shouldn't expect to do everything he could do before the accident.</sarcasm>

I see that Dr Rickards is doing a study comparing attitudes of CFS and psoriasis patients towards psychiatry. Not to trivialise psoriasis but it's a poor comparison group given the extreme disparity in symptom burden and levels of disability. It's hard to have a good attitude towards psychiatry when you have a life-destroying illness that you're told is curable by exercise. A better comparison would be something that's acknowledged to be "organic" but also really serious like MS, SLE etc.

Combining psychiatry and neurology... great idea in principle. I think the ultimate goal of neuroscience should be to dispose of psychiatry by figuring out the organic causes of "mental" illness and subsuming psychiatry under other medical specialties.